From Idolatry to Advertising: Visual Art and Contemporary Culture: Visual Art and Contemporary Culture by Susan G Josephson

Author:Susan G Josephson [Josephson, Susan G]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Political Science, Media Studies, Public Affairs & Administration
ISBN: 9781315479996
Google: nrQYDQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 32206826
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Arts and Crafts Movement

The Victorian machine designer imitated the craft designs in the new industrial situation. However, this was not a comfortable or satisfying solution. Both in Europe and America there were reactions against it. The English arts and crafts movement reacted by trying to reestablish the folk crafts and decoration, and throwing out the machine.

The arts and crafts movement was started in 1848, sponsored by William Morris (1834–96). William Morris had a disgust for the machine-made objects that people had in their homes, and he also disliked the values of the Industrial Revolution. Morris felt that the separation between arts and crafts had led to the degeneration of both. He felt that this separation had led to Fine Art being amusement to only a few, and to craft disappearing altogether as it became overwhelmed by manufacture. These two, he felt, should be reunited into a close companionship between beauty and use.

Morris thought that architecture and furniture ought to be designed with an eye to the nature of the materials and working processes. He thought that the surface decoration on items should be flat and non-illusionistic. Morris thought that only handicraft could have aesthetic value. He felt that the decorative art on the machine should not be just stuck on like icing on a cake, as it was on a Victorian machine, but should live a life of its own as it had in the past folk crafts tradition. However, while the decorations he had in mind were there to humanize the product, and make it more beautiful, they did not add meaning or spiritual value the way that the decorations in craft traditions do.

The arts and crafts movement was a romantic rejection of the machine, and a retreat into the handicrafts tradition and folk values that were being destroyed by the Industrial Revolution. This movement tried to revive the purely handicraft techniques of weavers, printers, and cabinet makers by revitalizing these old craft technologies. These handicrafts were disappearing, only surviving in isolated and backward places.

Morris felt that before the Industrial Revolution, people had experienced the happiness of making useful objects which had given them the opportunity to express themselves in their work. He felt that people should again make useful objects, and that making useful objects is the highest and best artistic activity. He wanted to replace the shoddy products of the machine age with the handicrafts revived from the pre-industrial past. He wanted art that was made by the people, for the people, as a happiness to the maker and user both.

This movement is important in the development of design because the ideas it expressed about craft were integrated with the ideology of machine-style functionalism in the first academy of modern design, the Bauhaus. The arts and crafts movement preserved the craftsman concerns for an integration of beauty and use into a harmonious design, and gave people a sense of what decorative motifs could be like in the machine age.

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